Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge

How interesting, moving images from 1888. This film only plays for two seconds and could be considered as the second film ever made, after 'Roundhay Garden Scene' from the same year and same director.

That director is Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, who mysteriously disappeared in 1890 after making only these two short films. Le Prince is the first great name when you talk about motion pictures, even though Lumière and Edison are much more famous. Seeing his two films, both two seconds long, gives a special feeling. Basically you are watching the birth of cinema. It is the same feeling you get while watching early work from Edison (his kinetoscopic record of a sneeze), Lumière (the arrival of a train) and Méliès (the first science-fiction narrative). You should try it!

By the way. The two seconds shows the Leeds Bridge full with pedestrians, horses and carriages.

Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince filmed this epic the very same year he gave us Roundhay Garden Scene. Instead of his family walking in circles he filmed, as the title would suggest, traffic crossing Leeds bridge. And when I say traffic I don't mean cars, trucks and buses. I mean people walking a couple of guys who were lucky enough to have horses and carriages.

Since Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince was the ONLY director to release any films in 1888 it proves he was the best director of his era. He didn't need big actors or loads of effects or a computerized ape. Just a camera and a bridge. And he was the man who gave birth to cinema. Not literally, that would be hideous.

Similar to Bill Sweeds movie: 'A ship runs across the ocean at 5 miles an hour.' In this case, though, we see a bunch of old fords and Chryslers being piloted. And on the cement corner, the mayor is shown saluting everything directly around him. Then he turns around and a camera barely catches his expression of bewildering confusion.

Unlike the previous commentator who failed to understand the historical importance of this piece of film and tried to review it in the context of 21st century technology, I would give this 10 out of 10 for the fact that without Le Prince's pioneering work, cinema as we know it might still be a pipe dream.

In terms of 19th century technology, which is the context in which it should be reviewed, this film is cutting edge.

The subject is recognisably a road across a city centre bridge in Victorian times. We have all seen plenty of still photographs from that era but in this composition, the horses and people actually move. I come from Yorkshire and I know that one branch of my family was resident in Leeds at this time so, who knows, one of those people could be a long-lost ancestor of mine. That's a romantic view but you really can't take anything other than a romantic view of something like this.

To see the film, follow the IMDb video clip and enjoy a glimpse of a bygone age. The title mentions traffic but you won't see any horseless carriages!

Absolutely fascinating.

This is only one of two films (the other being Roundhay Garden Scene) that survive from Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince. According to his son Adolphe Le Prince, this film was shot in Oct, 1888.

The elder Le Prince was a pioneer film-maker and the inventor of the first motion picture film camera to use perforated paper film. His work predates that of WKL Dickson working for Thomas Edison, and the films of the Lumière Brothers by a few years.

Alas, Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince was not to reap the fruits of his labour. In Sept, 1890, as he was taking a train to Paris to show his discovery to the world, Le Prince and all his camera equipment disappeared without a trace. Edison, Dickson, and Lumière would claim the credit for inventing the motion picture. But, it was really Le Prince who made the first ones (the efforts of Marey and Muybridge notwithstanding).